It was Aleister Crowley's mother - an almost repressively religious woman - who had given him the name of the Beast when she realized that she had spawned a monster. At the tender age of 11 he had dedicated himself to a life of evil which was later to embrace every excess, from sexual perversions to live sacrifices. His first victim was the family cat. He was eager to discover whether it had nine lives.

His voracious appetite for women started when he was 14, when he seduced the kitchen-maid on his mother's bed while the family were at church. From then on, he enjoyed an endless succession of whores and mistresses. Women were fascinated by his animal vitality and hypnotic eyes.

There was certainly danger and excitement when Crowley was around, but his women paid dearly for their thrills. He drove both his wives into lunatic asylums and abandoned every one of his mistresses to either the bottle, the hypodermic syringe or the streets.

Shown below is Crowley with first wife - Rose

Sex was the most powerful element in Crowley's form of Black Magic, which might explain why he failed his degree at Cambridge University. By then, he had become obsessed with the occult.

The blinding revelation that put Crowley's life on a new and dangerous path occurred on March 18, 1904 in the Cairo Museum when he was 28 years old.

A few days earlier, his wife, Rose, had remarked, as if in a trance, "Horus is waiting for you." Crowley had never heard of Horus. Suddenly, as they were walking through one of the museum galleries, she cried out, "There he is!" In a glass case was an image of the falcon-headed god Horus, painted on an ancient wooden obelisk; but what shook Crowley was the number on the exhibit label - it was 666, his number, the number of the beast.

That night, in a state approaching religious exaltation, Crowley invoked the spirit of Horus, and his faith was rewarded. According to Crowley, Horus sent a spirit-guide named Aiwass who proceeded to dictate a series of precepts and prophecies.

Then, over several weeks Crowley incorporated the supernatural messages into a huge volume called the The Book of the Law. The result was an almost unreadable ragbag of mysticism, poetry, prediction and pornography. But the ultimate meaning was clear: Mankind was on the brink of a New Dawn, and the prophet selected to lead the way was Aleister Crowley.

Crowley threw himself into his new mission with manic fervour; the horror was that he was a Messiah of Madness, marching backwards to the Black Ages of cruelty, superstition and diabolism.

His behaviour became more and more outrageous. He filed two of his teeth into a point, so he could give women the "Serpent's Kiss" when introduced. He defecated on drawing-room carpets, and when his hosts protested, he claimed his excreta was sacred.

He toured the world, collecting a retinue of gullible sensation-seekers, neurasthenics and occult cranks. At his temples of magic, newspapers referred in shocked tones to "nameless orgies" and "indescribable rites". His followers claimed that he could conjure up evil spirits, turn day into night and perform prodigious feats of second-sight and clairvoyance.

All his rituals, however, centered around sex. "I rave, I rape, I rip and I rend," he said in his Hymn to Pan. References to "Magick", "opuses" and "my work" were euphemisms to cover ceremonial sexual acts with his followers, usually perverted and frequently with several partners at the same time.

In the 1920s, as Crowley was at the height of his notoriety, nobody wanted him. Authorities in Italy had had enough, and expelled him from the country. He was deported from France and, for a time, refused entry to Britain; he had become a Satan without a hell to go to.

Slowly, the world began to forget about Aleister Crowley. A new Beast of the Apocalypse had risen in the west, who flaunted Crowley's favorite symbol of the crooked cross, or swastika. His name was Adolf Hitler, and his murderous rites were to make Crowley's contrived orgies look like nursery games.

Crowley then devoted himself to publishing - usually at his own expense - pornographic and pseudo-mystical books. One didn't have to read the books to guess their contents. The dust-jackets bore Crowley's signature, with the initial "A" in the form of a huge phallus.

On December 1, 1947, in obscure poverty in a boarding house, Aleister Crowley died of myocardial degeneration and chronic bronchitis. He was dependent on a daily dose of 11 injected grains of heroin, enough to kill a dozen men.